Serious questions about StarFive’s Disasterous Debian Implementation for Pine64’s Pinetab-V #

[!NOTE] In general, it is advised to avoid placing one’s foot in their mouth. Especially, if there is any question in one’s assuredness. For this article, we have chosen to ignore this advice.

Last month a PineTab-V was purchased from Pine64, and since it’s arrival the experience has been less than exhuberant. There is nothing physically wrong with the device, in fact, it’s quality is way better than expected. The problem, which is nearly a deal breaker even after purchasing the device, is the OS built for it.

Before we get too far down this road, we need to recognize the member effort of the Pine64 community who understand these issues, and are dilligently working to resolve them. Additionally before we start, it should be clarified, you are not required to keep the factory installed OS on your device, but if you do not, you are risking having peripherials become usable. Which now, brings us to the start of this post.

Why is StarFive's Debian Distrobution such a Disaster? #

To fully understand why Starfive's Debian distro is such an utter failure, we need to have an understanding of whan an embeded operating system is, and why is an embeded OS so different than a desktop/server OS. Lastly, we need to examine why choosing an embeded OS for the PineTab-V was fundamentally the wrong choice for use with a laptopt work environment.

[!warning] Due to being human, mistakes will happen, and often what appears obvious to one person is not obvious to another.

What exactly is it? #

This is the big question. It seems seems the system was designed to be a hybrid embeded system, meaning the file system and packaging are derived from a non-embeded system, where the kernel was built to run in an embeded system. An embeded operating system is an operating system that has been streamlined for performance, and stripped of everything but what is exactly required. This was probably done to speed up the performance of the machine, unfortunately it was also a decision made in error, as the act of streamlining will rob future users of potentially needed functionality. Streamlining will remove all but the required drivers needed for the device itself, and any additional drivers needed to communicate with other devices will not be present.

So, is it just an embeded form of Debian? #

No, it’s definitely a custom job, as the kernel does not appear to be built using Debian kernel tooling, but rather a heavily customized fork of the buildroot embeded linux build system. This conclusion came from the development kit provided by StarFive for the Pine64 Pinetab-V. It is intended to be compatible with with a debian release, just not the current release. Which is a whole nother can of worms.

The pinning of the shrew. #

Ok, so there is not really a shrew, it just sounded good, but there is some rather unforunate pinning that went into the design of StarFive’s debian disaster we have yet to gain understanding of. Upon booting the system, it